June 2009 Archives

In my previous posts regarding the 7 Core principles of Open Communications I focused on areas that were specific to platform architecture.
In this post, I want to talk about how you can successfully design, integrate, and maintain your platform so that you are getting the most of your solution.
Wrapping services around your UC platform choice is of great importance to ensuring your implementation is successful. From simple implementation of the core platform to integrating with other line of business applications, its important to have a methodology that is able to be repeated. A successful project starts with up front consulting and provides you, the customer, with the framework of how to proceed with your project.

As UC enters into a more mature phase in the market, it might seem too late for a Taxonomy that describes all of the various acronyms, vendor positioning, deployment scenarios, and peripheral components that define the overall market. From the many customer meetings I have attended as well as analyst/consultant interactions, I still believe its probably useful to undertake the exercise. Part of what is holding up mass adoption of Unified Communications is that it encompasses a vast array of terminology and technologies that are daunting to many customers. Beyond defining UC, it would be incredibly helpful to give customers a navigation tool that would in effect spell it out in plain terms.Continue Reading...

Today I am happy to have Matt Hartley from our Solutions Engineering Group provide a great guest blog on the topic of UC and Social Networking. Thanks Matt for this informative post.

Social networking has become an Internet phenomenon and it continues to grow. Web sites like Facebook alone have well over 200 million active users, and of those users, close to 100 million of them log on each day. Those are staggering numbers and no wonder this type of online community is an advertiser's dream. As a matter of fact, today many sales professionals use online social networking as a direct way of selling their products and services. So, from a sales and marketing perspective the customer reach is vast on
a social networking site like Facebook. It only makes sense to jump on the band wagon. Also, many organizations are moving to online social networking as a way to bring their colleagues together. If you go to LinkedIn, you'll see thousands of company profiles available to be searched. It's almost like having access to a big corporate directory in the sky, or in technical terms, the cloud.
And to be honest, that is exactly what it is. As more and more people get online and join social networks, organizations really have no choice but to follow them. And in the not so distant future, more and more organizations will adopt online social networking as a way for bringing people together to communicate, to collaborate and to share ideas. Heck, if the people are already online sharing photos, there is no reason they couldn't spend some time working on productive tasks for their company or organization, especially if they are getting paid.

So, what does this mean for Unified Communications? Well, in order for organizations to fully adopt social networking one day as a viable
meeting place for getting work done, a couple things have to happen. One, organizations must feel comfortable with cloud computing. And we all
know the hesitations there: reliability, availability, and security. Two, cloud based business services would have to be provided by the social networking site so that work can get done.

The other day, we had a rather severe weather event in my area that resulted in a rather lengthy outage of our cable service and in turn no connectivity to my enterprise. Luckily for me, I had a backup plan and was able to reconnect
using my cellular 3G card. It got me to thinking about all of the possible points of failure that can impact us in the enterprise. In a typical enterprise, there are many moving parts that must all work together to provide end users seamless
connectivity and high availability.